One of the oldest marketing tricks around is to analyze what your competition is doing in order to improve your business’ organic search efforts. That said, I was keen to find out what the experts had to say about competitive analysis at this early SES: San Francisco session, held by Jamie Smith, Justin Freid and Jim Yu.
Tools to Help you Spy
Do you know who your competitors are? If so, are you also aware who your direct competitors in the digital sphere are? There might be a difference and there might even be some new contenders since you last checked. In case you aren’t certain take a note of these tools that help you to identify and analyze the competition:
- Google AdWords
- Semrush
- Spyfu
- Ghostery
Looking at the latter of these, Ghostery is a plugin currently available for Firefox and Chrome which helps you to easily see which pixels fire when you land on a page. In other words, it helps you identify what software your competitors are using to run campaigns. If you are struggling with your implemented campaign it might be worth looking at the other options adopted by your competition by using this software.
Ghostery also helps to show which partners your competitors are advertising with. Who knows, it might be worth considering using the same sources? Moreover, it helps you to understand what your competitors are considering to be a conversion. And because it “sees the invisible web – tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons” (as they say on their site), it helps you to save-time. Instead of digging through code to find tracking pixels or conversion tags you can just fire up Ghostery.
Apparently 20% of head terms are made of keywords, so by looking at your competitors’ sites you can already identify some of their keyword groups. This comes in handy when you want to improve or optimize your account structure as well as your geo-targeting as it provides you with the top performing search terms as well as the geographical locations used.
What to Track
Wouldn’t it be great if you could keep an eye on your competitors’ home pages and be in the know when they are adding new links, when they change their title tags or even know when they add new content?
Apart from home pages, wouldn’t it be useful to track changes they are making to deep high ranking pages such as changing content, anchor text alterations or even changes to HTML , tags etc.?
And now think about landing pages: knowing that their call to action has changed (was a new button color utilized or has a form been shortened) is crucial for any marketing and search efforts as well as strategy development.
So have you been asking yourself what keywords are being used by competitors and how much they spend on these each month, in other words defining their media value and media ownership?
Knowing what keywords your competitors are utilizing and how ad keywords overlap is crucial for any business as you’ll identify new opportunities to bring your brand forward! Knowing how much budget your field players are allocating to digital will also help you to understand what it takes to be competitive. However, in order to clearly get the most out of that you ought to know how many visitors they are attracting each month.
But don’t get stuck in the tunnel of opportunities because SEO and SEM accounts for far more than just ranking for keywords and buying traffic! Still, it is a good starting point for any business to really optimize their efforts and operations in order to be competitive.
Driving Conversions
Quite frankly, the reason why all of us are in SEO is that higher rankings drive conversions. So here are a few key rules as suggested by the SES strategists:
- Track the whole picture – with external SEO metrics at scale
- Link to your business – with the integration to site analytics
- Measure your true SEO ROI – by tracking rankings to revenue
What we can conclude from that is that the SEO winner takes it all simply because as soon as one site’s rank goes up another site’s rank goes down!
Steps to Identifying and Overcoming Competition
At this point I’d like to outline a more structured approach to beat your competition. This was recommended by the panelists, but bare in mind that many of the following long processes can be done very easily with Linkdex (more of that shameless plug later!).
First of all search marketers should ‘discover’ competition by measuring their share of voice. So… what exactly is meant by ‘share of voice’? Essentially this is the share of the top performing keywords related to search volume multiplied by the click-through rate. Calculating this enables you to uncover and prioritize each theme through the share of voice.
Questions you ought to ask yourself are therefore: who is my competition, what is their market share and am I actively tracking them? To calculate the share of voice (in easier terms now!) you have to:
- Identify groups of targeted keywords
- Run the keywords through Google’s keyword tool (including local exact match)
- Take the top 10 ranking pages for each keyword (supported by an SEO tool)
- Convert the search volume to visits by multiplying by the click-through, depending on the rank (e.g with Google Webmaster tools)
- Convert visits to revenue by using the average conversion percentage and value
- And finally summarize by domain.
Constantly eyeballing your competitors’ keyword strengths and weaknesses, SEOs should continue to track blended ranks for keyword groups and global engines (depending on the countries you are operating within). This will put you in the know when it comes to which keywords need further optimization.
This data can also help inform your universal results performance. Wherever your competition has universal results and you don’t, then you can optimize for these keywords and content types. And where you have universal results that your competitors don’t, that is where you can continue to gain distance in the rankings.
Linkdex’s Competitor Analysis Tools
As I mentioned earlier, a lot of this can be done quickly and painlessly with Linkdex. Back in May we released a site crawler (an innovation which was shortlisted for a European Search Award) that allows users to crawl domains and gather data on virtually anything. This includes broken links, page performance, backlinks (including anchor text), server errors, rankings, traffic etc. See more about this on our onsite optimization page.
And, with regards to universal results, Linkdex lets you know what universal results appear for your keyword searches and whether or not you are included in them. As above, comparing this to your competitor’s performance can help you get ahead where it matters.
Social
Unsurprisingly social is quickly becoming a foundation block for SEO strategies. This is highlighted by impressive statistics which suggest that 3 out of 4 brands are now on Google+. Adoption is obviously still rising (at a lower pace than before), but nevertheless Google+ pages are now showing in around 6 times in the search results. It looks like it’s time to jump on the bandwagon if you haven’t already! At the very least it’s time to evaluate your competition’s SEO and social efforts.
With the continued growth of G+ it’s clear that marketers need to pay attention and dedicate time and efforts into their social signals. Start tracking social signals for the top 10 pages on SERP, followed by collecting signal counts for your pages that matter. You can also dial up social media activity for pages where the top 10 pages have more signals.
For an in-depth competitor analysis track rankings for competitor pages that rank for your keywords, measure social signals for these pages and correlate rankings with signal count and replicate what’s working for the competition.
Backlinks and Authors
Next on the list is identifying backlink opportunities by tracking the number and quality of your competitor’s links: do you have enough high quality links compared to your competitors? Who’s linking to them? What’s the authority level of these domains? Should you get a backlink from these domains?
If you want to drill down even further into their link strategy (and I know you SEOs aim for this a tiny bit more!) you can do the following:
- Identify link hubs that are driving rankings for that particular segment
- Classify links based on their type (blog, PR, news, social, partnerships) NB: Linkdex does this very well.
- Ask whether you have links of each type to these hubs and domains?
As a small teaser for those interested in powerful link building, Linkdex are working on a very exciting innovation that allows SEOs to identify and build links to actual authors. With the rise of authorship and G+ it is increasingly important not to target sites but the people behind them (people who might even write for other domains). Stay tuned for more!
So what have we learned?
To summarize, these are the three steps to successful competitor analysis:
- Discover Competitors - by product, category, market, theme
- Analyze the Competition - keyword groups, global, blended rank, universal and social
- Improve Your Share of Voice - keyword, back link, on-page opportunities
Thank you to Jamie, Justin and Jim for an informative panel and please leave comments if you have any thoughts on competitor analysis!
Featured Image Source: JohnGoode – Flickr
